A cloud-computing management platform that manages a cloud-computing environment may maintain a service catalog that describes services that the cloud-computing environment can provide. When a user requests a service described by an entry in the service catalog, the cloud-computing management platform uses information comprised by the entry to provide the requested service by provisioning a virtual machine or by installing, configuring, or otherwise deploying application software. Fulfilling the user's request may further comprise, but is not limited to, provisioning, deprovisioning, or modifying an attribute of the service described by the entry in the service catalog.
A virtual machine that is provisioned in an existing virtualized computing environment, where that existing virtualized environment is not a cloud-computing environment, may not be described in such a service catalog. One step of importing that virtual machine and the business applications or services it provides into a cloud-computing environment is generating and entering an entry for the virtual machine, applications, or services into the cloud-computing environment's service catalog.
Such generating, however, generally cannot be performed by an automated means because, among other possible reasons, the virtual machine may be provisioned or configured in a way that does not conform with characteristics of services offered by the cloud-computing environment or with an other convention or standard of the cloud-computing environment. Resolving such issues may require a manual entry-generation procedure that may be cumbersome, vulnerable to error, or time-consuming. When a large enterprise must migrate thousands of such non-cloud virtual machines into a cloud-computing environment, generating corresponding service-catalog entries may become extraordinarily resource-intensive.